Hillary Deweese has been making what she calls "cute lil guys" out of polymer clay since she was about seven. Clay By Hillary in its current shape only started in 2024, which makes the thirty-odd years in between a long apprenticeship in something she was doing anyway.
She works out of Baltimore County. Everything is sculpted by hand, one at a time.
Why She Is Here
Because of Motthew.
The Mothman pins are small, black, red-eyed and unreasonably expressive — somewhere between a moth and a very tired owl, with eyebrows doing most of the work. They come as pins, as earrings, as necklaces and as little seated figures on their own dishes.
They are called Motthew, after her husband Matthew. When she restocks, she calls it building a Motthew army.
Point Pleasant is about six hours from Baltimore, and this index has a long piece about the thirteen months in 1966 and 1967 when a whole town was watching the sky. What she has made is not an illustration of that. It is the thing those stories turn into eventually — an affectionate object somebody keeps on a shelf, sixty years and four hundred miles from the bridge.
The Rest Of It
Lemon sticks, cat ring dishes, tiny birds with matching eggs, sun-catchers shaped like sea creatures. Her own summary of the whole enterprise is "BIG fan of weird little guys and tchotchkes", and there is not much to add to that.
Workshops
She teaches, regularly, around Baltimore — sculpt-a-pet evenings where people immortalise their own animals, bird earring sessions, seaside sun-catcher afternoons. If you are within reach of the city, that is a better way to meet the work than buying it.
Her pieces are also stocked at Odd Belle in Frederick, and she does markets across Maryland through the year. The schedule moves; her site keeps it.
Support Their Work
These go straight to Hillary Deweese. OddWay takes nothing and has no arrangement with anyone listed here.